Patents
How to Take the Concert Home
Sabra Chartrand
DIGITAL technology has put the "instant" into many forms of instant gratification. Instant messaging, instant photography via cellphones and instant-answer Web sites are just a few areas where people no longer have to wait for real-time satisfaction.
And now, in a growing number of nightclubs and music arenas, audiences leaving a performance can buy a CD recording of the live concert that is still ringing in their ears.
David Griner, 43, a lawyer in Austin, Tex., first dreamed of an instant recording in the early 1980's as he left a Bruce Springsteen concert wishing he could listen to it all over again in his car on the way home.
"The technology wasn't available to produce these recordings," Mr. Griner said recently. "Once CD-burning technology started to appear on the scene, it clicked and I thought, 'now we have the technology to do this.' "
Mr. Griner and his brother, James, have received the first patent for "creating digital recordings of live performances." Their process uses microphones, recording and audio mixing hardware and software, CD burners and a method of executing the recording and burning process to make it unique.
"It's the organization of the existing CD-burning technology that makes all this work," Mr. Griner said of his patent. "We record the show and do some minimal manipulation of cutting into the tracks, and whether it's on a hard drive or master CD, there are a lot of slave towers, and we pop it in and start burning copies."
"So as each song finishes, we start burning that song onto a CD," he explained. "So at the end of the show, we only have the last song to burn on each CD."
But the Griners' system is not the only one for churning out instant CD's for jazz musicians, independent bands and classic rock acts. Several companies are licensed to record live performances and sell the CD's to audiences immediately afterward. Some also offer them for delivery within a couple of days, and several say they have patents pending. The two largest use huge trucks to move their recording and CD-burning operations from venue to venue.
The Griner brothers have sold their patent to one of those, called Instant Live, which is owned by the radio and concert promotion behemoth, Clear Channel Communications. Like its competitors, Instant Live says about 20 percent of audiences are buying instant CD's. The recording industry says these audiences already spend $400 million a year on concert merchandise like T-shirts, posters and other souvenirs - so everyone is hoping the Griner brothers have hit on the next big thing.
But the Griners just wanted a way to amplify their enjoyment of their favorite bands.
"The genesis of the idea is that I'm a big live music fan, and always have been, especially for some of the lesser-known bands," David Griner explained. "With bands at that level, a lot of what goes into a concert and what you go to see can't ever be captured again. A lot of it comes across in what they say and do. It doesn't come out on the studio CD or live recordings. I've always been bothered that it was lost forever. I wished I could bottle it and carry it home."
He and his younger brother James, 40, an electrical engineer who lives outside Seattle, also wanted their invention to combat bootlegging.
"Bootlegs are less appealing because someone else gets the money, and the artist is not getting anything," David Griner said. "Especially for the people I go see. Most are starving to death anyway. So I didn't want to take away their money."
The Griners' idea did not take off right away. Early CD-burning technology was too slow to make hundreds or thousands of copies within minutes of a concert's end.
"The main thing was proving we could get the CD's out right after the show was over," Mr. Griner remembered. "We didn't think the audience would sit and wait for half an hour, which is what it took to burn CD's then.
"In 1999 and 2000, there wasn't a peep about this," Mr. Griner continued, even though it was possible to burn CD's by then. "But once burn speed got up, people started moving into it. That's the only thing that makes this commercially feasible."
The Griners' first working model was compiled from off-the-shelf recording equipment.
As the first batch of CD's is being sold, follow-up batches are being created.
Mr. Griner believes that Instant Live will also be able to use his patent to eventually make instant DVD's of concerts.
"The patent addresses video, too, and the technology exists to do DVD's," he said. "DVD burn technology is a lot slower, but I still think it can be done."
But technology has not been the only hurdle to instant recordings.
"As the industry took off, we found probably more resistance from record labels than from technological limits. The record companies were afraid they'd lose CD sales." Mr. Griner said, who disagrees with their stance.
"People who buy these CD's are genuine fans and they own every CD already," he said. He said he thought those fans would buy a live concert recording because a band might play an older, more obscure song, cover someone else's song say something original to the audience during the show. It's less like a concert T-shirt, he added, and more like a coffee table book from a museum exhibition.
"I think these CD's are more valuable to people who were at the show," he added. "If you were there you want to re-experience it."
The Griner brothers are not involved with Instant Live, and a confidentiality clause prevented any discussion of the terms of the patent sale.
"I always hoped that when this got put together, I'd get to go on the road with the Boss," Mr. Griner said, referring to the sobriquet that pop music fans have given Bruce Springsteen. "But I guess I'll have to buy my ticket like anybody else."
Even Mr. Griner's respect for pop stars has limits, however.
"I don't know how popular this would be at a Britney Spears concert," he said. "She doesn't do a lot of covers or unique songs, so consequently the concerts all sound the same."
David and James Griner received patent No. 6,614,729.
Patents may be viewed on the Web
atwww.uspto.gov or may be ordered through the mail, by patent number, for $3 from the Patent and Trademark Office, Washington, D.C. 20231.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/03/te.../03patent.html
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Hoping to Attract Callers to the Internet
Ken Belson and Matt Richtel
Some of America's biggest telecommunications companies are meeting here this week to discuss how best to provide phone services to consumers. It will not be telephone companies talking, though, but cable providers.
The effort by the cable companies to make deeper inroads into telephone services by using Internet technology will be the No. 1 topic at the industry's annual trade show here that continues through Wednesday. There will be much backslapping given the success cable providers have had rolling out high-speed Internet, and they will be eager to show how their new Internet-based phone services that use those broadband connections will be just as triumphant.
But selling high-speed connections and phone services are two different things, and cable companies are certain to face an uphill climb beating the telephone industry in this latest contest. Many consumers still see high-speed Internet connections as a largely generic service, which they can buy from many different vendors.
But choosing a phone service is a more emotional decision. Telephone companies have well-established brands and have been reliable providers of voice calls for decades. Cable companies are still viewed, not as phone providers, but in terms of the television programming they offer.
Moreover, phone calling over the Internet is relatively new, and providers of all types are still working out the technological flaws as well as customer and billing services. Those gaps in service may alienate customers, analysts said, if cable companies introduce Internet calling too quickly.
"Depending on the cable provider, the quality of the telephony is all over the map and bad news travels by word of mouth faster than good news," Lisa Pierce, vice president at Forrester Research, said. But that risk has not stopped the cable companies from introducing Internet phone services. With all the promotion surrounding the technology and its potential to lower phone bills substantially, the cable providers do not want to be beaten by AT&T, Qwest and other telephone companies that have started Internet calling options and start-ups like Vonage, which entered the nascent market two years ago.
Cable companies are also eager to recoup some of the roughly $75 billion they spent in the last few years to upgrade their networks so they could offer Internet calling and other digital services.
Though the cable network has been in place for a while, selling Internet calling broadly became more possible when the telephone switches needed to best deploy the technology became commercially available. In December, Time Warner Cable, the nation's second-largest cable company after Comcast, announced plans to make Internet phone service available by the end of this year in all 31 markets it serves.
Cablevision Systems also announced an ambitious program, and signed up 29,000 customers in the last two months of 2003. The company said it was increasing subscriptions by 2,500 a week.
Cox Communications began its first Internet phone service in Roanoke, Va., last year and it expects to introduce the service in other small and midsize markets in the coming months. (Cox will, however, continue to offer phone service through an older circuit-switched technology in larger markets where denser concentrations of customers make using that technology more feasible. )
Cox added 78,959 customers to its phone services in the first quarter of this year, 37 percent more than in the period a year ago, with most new customers receiving circuit- switched calls. In any event, Cox, the industry leader, has one million phone customers, a small number compared with the big local phone companies.
"A lot of customers don't know cable companies offer telephony," said David Pugliese, the vice president for product marketing and management at Cox Communications.
Still, cable industry executives say the real growth will start in 2005, when Internet phone services are available in more markets. Encouragingly, too, they say, customers who order telephone service with their cable and Internet connections are 50 percent less likely to switch providers.
"We get more from a telephony halo effect," Mr. Pugliese said, referring to the high retention rate of cable consumers who choose cable telephone service.
Cox and other cable companies are also eager to promote their reliability. Unlike other Internet phone service providers that use the public Internet to transmit calls over phone networks, cable companies use their own cable lines. This allows them to offer better quality control of calls traveling on their networks.
"We can prioritize the voice bits so they are not interfered with, so you get excellent quality," said Tom Rutledge, the chief operating officer at Cablevision Systems.
Cable companies also note that they offer consumers convenient installation through regular cable company workers. And like the telephone companies, they charge flat fees for unlimited local and long-distance calls connected via the Internet, along with added features like caller ID.
Still, offering innovative technology is no guarantee that customers will cut their ties to their traditional telephone companies, analysts say. To get customers to switch, the cable industry will have to spend a lot of money marketing Internet telephony even as they are introducing other services like video on demand and digital video recorders.
"If you're a cable operator, there are five or six things happening," said Adi Kishore, a cable industry analyst at the Yankee Group. "With a lot of things going on, it's a matter of where you want to focus."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/03/te...y/03voice.html
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Movement itself a Trojan Horse?
FTC Officials Blast Spyware Measures
Declan McCullagh
Two Federal Trade Commission officials ignited a political firestorm on Thursday by criticizing proposed laws targeting spyware and suggesting that the measures might harm legitimate software products, too.
During an appearance before a House of Representatives panel, FTC Commissioner Mozelle Thompson said the measures were the wrong approach to spyware and adware. "I do not believe legislation is the answer at this time," he said. "Instead, we should give industry the time to respond...Self-regulation combined with enforcement of existing laws might be the best way to go."
Members of the Energy and Commerce subcommittee on consumer protection reacted angrily to the advice, accusing Thompson and Howard Beales, director of the FTC's bureau of consumer protection, of being the only Americans who enjoyed having their computers infected by spyware and adware.
"You like this stuff? You're the only person in this country that wants spyware on their computer," Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, said to Beales. Referring to the rest of the panel, Barton added, "I would double down and bet that if asked whether they want to take it off, every one but you, sir, (would)."
While neither term has any well-accepted definition, adware tends to refer to pop-up advertising networks like those run by WhenU and Claria (formerly Gator). Spyware is more pernicious and can seize control of a computer or leak information. Politicians are feeling pressure to slap restrictions on both spyware and adware this year, and have drafted two new bills in the House. A third has been introduced in the Senate.
Subcommittee Chairman Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., told Thompson, "I'm a little concerned that you're not outraged that people have access to someone's privacy, Social Security numbers, and all this, and you're saying let it go by the wayside."
The FTC representatives countered by saying that while they were "outraged" by spyware, a careful approach was necessary. In addition, during an FTC workshop last week, a prosecutor noted that the Justice Department already had sufficient legal authority under existing computer crime laws to put the most noxious spyware makers in prison.
"We need to determine whether there is a definable class of software that can be called spyware," Beales said. Installing legitimate programs like Microsoft Windows or word processors could be made much more cumbersome if users had to give explicit consent to every one of hundreds of small applications that made up the application, Beales said. Thompson added that spyware is "difficult, if not impossible, to define."
Software industry lobbyists have warned that broad legislation against spyware and adware, such as a controversial Utah law, can have unintended consequences, prohibiting legitimate and desirable utilities and operating system features. One House bill defines spyware as "any software" that "transmits" personal information--a category that would include any e-mail client (because it transmits an address on the "from" line) and many Unix utilities.
But key politicians from both major parties are itching to do something soon, saying their own House computers have been infected by hundreds of adware and spyware strains.
"We are going to move Heaven and Earth to work on a bipartisan basis to modify the (Mary Bono) bill and move it at subcommittee and full committee and onto the floor and to the Senate...this year," said Barton, the chairman of the full Energy and Commerce committee. "I'm not guaranteeing that that'll happen, but the intent of the hearing is to start that process."
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-5202016.html\
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Not enough competition
Internet Music Copyright Rules Worry EU
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Commission has warned societies which collect royalties on behalf of musicians that they may be breaking competition rules by extending their national monopolies into the world of the Internet.
"The European Commission has warned 16 organisations that collect royalties on behalf of music authors that their so-called Santiago agreement is potentially in breach of EU competition rules," it said in a statement on Monday.
It said this was because the cross-licensing arrangements that the societies had between each other caused an effective lock up of national territories, which extended to the Internet the national monopolies the societies have held in the off-line world.
"The Commission believes that there should be competition between collecting societies to the benefit of companies that offer music on the Internet and to consumers that listen to it."
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/040503/80/esmd5.html
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Authority Declares Sharing Of Piracy Data With US Partners Illegal
Joe Figueiredo
The Dutch data protection authority, CBP, has completed its investigation into BREIN, the Dutch entertainment industry’s anti-piracy association, and its practice of sharing information with its counterparts in the USA, and has concluded that this practice is contrary to Dutch data-protection and privacy laws.
According to a CBP spokesperson, "The US does not maintain a suitable level of [privacy] protection. The passing on of information is in principle forbidden, unless the recipient organisation meets a high protection level (the ‘safe harbour’ principles), or has received appropriate permission from the [Dutch] minister of justice."
The compiled data that has been passed on include such personal details as name, address, bank account number and IP address (which identifies the ‘absolute’ address of a website).
In another case, CBP has threatened to fine KPN unless the Dutch telecom giant submits an adequate plan on how it intends to deal with unlisted telephone numbers.
Following a year-long joint investigation with OPTA (the Dutch telecom regulator) into KPN’s practice of selling direct marketers name-and-address information on its unlisted subscribers - with neither their knowledge nor approval - CBP informed the telecom company in August, 2003, that its business practice was considered ‘most irregular’.
At the time, KPN was given four weeks to explain how and when it intended to put a halt to this practice, and its plan to inform existing and new subscribers of its policy on unlisted numbers.
However, according to CBP, KPN’s plan "falls short of the mark" and hence its warning to penalise the telecom company if a improved plan is not forthcoming within three weeks.
http://www.dmeurope.com/default.asp?ArticleID=1650
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Thought crimes and torture
Tunisia
A Ninth Internet-User From Zarzis Sentenced To 25 Months In Prison
An 18-year-old Tunisian Internet-user Abderrazak Bourguiba, was sentenced to 25 months in prison by the youth criminal court in Tunis on 16 April. Eight other members of the "Zarzis Internet-users" group were sentenced to prison terms of up to 26 years on 6 April on terrorism charges for having downloaded files from the Internet that were judged subversive.
An 18-year-old Tunisian Internet-user Abderrazak Bourguiba, was sentenced to 25 months in prison by the youth criminal court in Tunis on 16 April.
Eight other members of the "Zarzis Internet-users" group were sentenced to prison terms of up to 26 years on 6 April on terrorism charges for having downloaded files from the Internet that were judged subversive.
Tunisian authorities have said that the group "was trying to make contact with the terrorist al-Qaeda movement for logistical support", planned to launch a rocket attack against the maritime guard at Zarzis port and was preparing an attack on a secondary school.
Said Ben Amor, one of the lawyers for the young men, told Agence France-Presse that the defence had walked out of the 16 April hearing to protest at "the absence of prosecution evidence" and refusal to allow a medical examination of their client. Abderrazak Bourguiba appeared before the court with a pierced eardrum and signs of facial paralysis following torture inflicted on him in prison.
Reporters Without Borders repeated its appeal for the release of the Zarzis Internet-users, pointing out that no serious evidence had been produced to support the charge against them. The international press freedom organisation said that simply looking at Internet sites could not in any case constitute grounds for a conviction.
Eight young Internet users convicted of terrorism on no evidence
Reporters Without Borders today voiced shock and outrage today at sentences of up to 26 years in prison imposed by a Tunis court on 6 April on eight Internet users from the southern city of Zarzis who were accused of promoting terrorist attacks on no other evidence than files downloaded from the Internet.
"The trial of these young people shows the Tunisian judicial system's outrageous contempt for the right of defence," the organisation said, calling for their release when their appeal is heard. "Just looking at Internet sites cannot be considered evidence of a terrorist plot - the Tunisian regime is trying to terrorize Internet users and silence dissent."
The organisation called on the international community, starting with the United States and the European Union, to reaffirm that the fight against terrorism does not under any circumstances justify violating individual freedoms or letting justice take second place to the arbitrary exercise of power.
A Tunis criminal court headed by judge Adel Jeridi sentenced seven people to 19 years and three months in prison. They were Hamza Mahrouk, 21, Farouk Chelandi, 21, Amor Rached, 21, Abdel-Ghaffar Guiza, 21, Aymen Mecharek, 22, Ridha Hadj Brahim, a 38-year-old teacher, and Ayoub Sfaxi, who normally lived abroad.
Tahar Guemir, 19, who also normally lived abroad, was sentenced to 26 years in prison as the alleged ring-leader. A ninth defendant, 19-year-old Abderrazak Bourguiba, is to be tried shortly by a minors court because he was only 17 at the time of the alleged crimes. Reporters Without Borders called for Bourguiba's immediate release.
The eight were convicted of "forming a band to terrorize people... aggression against individuals with the intent to terrorize... holding unauthorized meetings... theft and attempted theft... preparing explosive material [and] unauthorized possession of substances intended for making explosive devices."
Reporters Without Borders has been told that the prosecution produced no serious evidence against the defendants. The case file only contained a few files which they had downloaded from the Internet, such as information about the Kalashnikov rifle and documents explaining how to make a bomb. When the arrests were make, the police only confiscated a tube of a glue and a few CD-ROMs, which were the only evidence to support the allegation of making explosives.
One of the defence lawyers, Najib Hosni, said many irregularities marred the judicial proceedings. For example, as they were arrested in Zarzis, they should have been tried there, and not in Tunis. Five of the defendants filed a complaint alleging that they were tortured, but the court refused to allow any medical examination.
According to several different sources, the young defendants just used the Internet to download files about the situation in the Middle East. They also reportedly talked with one of their teachers, Ridha Hadj Brahim (who is one of those convicted), about the best way to support the Palestinian cause.
http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=9763
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Senate To Mull Copyright, Piracy Measures
Declan McCullagh
The Senate Judiciary committee on Thursday approved four intellectual property bills, clearing the way for votes on the Senate floor. The measures would criminalize using camcorders in movie theaters; increase fees for patent applications; clarify existing law dealing with joint applications for patents; and permit the Justice Department to bring civil lawsuits against copyright pirates.
Judiciary Chairman Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said at the hearing he would delay a vote on a fifth bill that changes penalties for copyright infringement and increases reporting of computer hacking and copyright prosecutions. "I will hold the Hatch-Feinstein Enforce Act for an additional week as I understand that we will be able to achieve more consensus among stakeholders," he said.
http://news.com.com/2110-1028_3-5203059.html
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New Zeland P2P-blocking manuver
No Server Ruling Extended To More JetStream Plans
Paul Brislen
Users of Telecom's various "speed-limited" JetStream plans will have to make do with dynamic IP addresses as they are on residential plans and aren't allowed to host servers.
Several users have questioned why they are being asked to switch from a static-IP address to a dynamic one, however Telecom spokeswoman Katrina King says the policy is clearly spelt out.
"Telecom requires all JetStream customers with speed limited plans ... to have a single dynamic address. These plans are only available to residential customers and, as such, they would not require a static IP address to run business applications.”
King says this applies to all JetStream Starter, JetStream Home and JetStream Surf plans but not to the full-speed JetStream products which are also available for business users.
The ruling has been handed on to other ISPs as well. King says the JetStream Surf plans have highlighted a problem with Telecom's billing system and the way some ISPs are treated.
"The introduction of the JetStream Surf plans has highlighted an issue with the way Telecom accounts for the difference between static and dynamic IP addresses and the associated accounting records, on the Fast-IP Direct Service. This issue affects a small number of ISPs who share a context on the Fast-IP Direct Service."
Telecom is working on a solution to the problem.
Telecom announced it would enforce its "no server" rule for JetStream Starter customers in December 2001 after the peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing craze caused noticeable amounts of traffic to be uploaded from users' home PCs.
http://www.computerworld.co.nz/news....F?OpenDocument
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Comcast Tells Infringing Customers They've Been Bad
Tim Markle
Comcast recently sent out letters to DMCA-infringing customers, informing them of their illegal downloading transgressions. My friend, Supa, was one of the lucky ones who received this letter. The notice clearly states that Comcast has been asked by the copyright owner to tell the individual of their actions and demand that the downloaded file(s) be immediately removed. In addition, the individual must write a return letter, which consists of an explanation and/or an apology. This will then be passed on to the copyright owner, who will look it over and consider further action. It appears that if a valid explanation is given (ie. I don't know how to secure my access point and my neighbors run wild on my connection...) then both Comcast and the copyright owner will be happy. If the explanation is not satisfactory however, they may proceed with fines, termination of service, ect.
The whole tone of the letter seems odd to me. My feeling is that Comcast doesn't want to get involved, but is pressured to do so by outside forces. So besides focusing on QOS or improving customer support, they're forced to spend time policing their own pipe, looking for flagged data. Also, in case you were wondering, at the bottom of the letter, the exact file that is in question is cited, with time, filesize, and IP information. In my friend's case, it was an XviD of Walking Tall, which was made by MGM. It will be interesting to see how this plays out and if this will influence other ISPs to go after customers at Hollywood's request.
http://aorula.com/2004_05_01_archive...56004494418547
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Patent piracy, or Goliath's comeuppance?
Small Firms Often Targeted In Obscure Infringement Cases
Bob Sullivan
David Eastburn and Sandy Trevor are packrats from the Internet's earliest days, but they never suspected how valuable their computer clutter might be.
During the 1980s, both were high- ranking executives at the fledgling Compuserve online service. By force of habit, they saved much of the hardware, software and content they ran across — including the competition's content. Theirs is among the best collections of pre-Internet memorabilia you'll find, a collection that some day might be worthy of the Smithsonian Institute.
But right now, their collection is much more valuable inside a courtroom.
Armed with this archive, Trevor and Eastburn run a tiny company called Nuvocom Inc., which often finds itself in the middle of contentious patent disputes involving Internet technologies.
In 1999, inventor Witold Ziarno sued the American Red Cross for accepting donations on its Web site, saying he had patented the electronic process by which the donations were made. Ziarno demanded a licensing fee from the non-profit agency for infringing on his patent, which he applied for in 1993 — before most people had even heard of the World Wide Web.
Red Cross attorneys hired Nuvocom to hunt for "prior art" — proof that the patent wasn't valid, because electronic donations were already in use before Ziarno filed for his patent. Researchers digging through the electronic archives found examples of UNICEF taking donations on Compuserve's service in the early 1990s. Trevor and Eastburn then reconstructed the UNICEF Compuserve site, complete with vintage hardware and a 1990 version of Compuserve's service. They operated the site in open court, and Ziarno lost his case, and later, his appeal. But the defeat didn't deter dozens of other small intellectual property firms from trying to turn old patents into Internet-age profits.
It starts with chaos
The chaos of the patent-granting process in the Internet and software realms has made Eureka moments just as common in the courtroom as in the invention laboratory. There's a long line of celebrated cases involving Web sites deploying commonly-used Internet technologies — in patent lingo, business methods — that are suddenly challenged by a patent holder who seemingly emerges from nowhere. Often, the plaintiff is a small intellectual property firm with big plans to cash in. And increasingly, small companies with no legal budget are being targeted because they are the least likely to mount a challenge.
"I find this whole thing kind of disturbing. ... This kind of enforcement strategy really reinforces stereotypes of lawyers in general," said Jon Hangartner, who argues both sides of patent cases. "It increases people's distrust and frustration with the legal system."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4837371/
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Patent Awarded to Invention to Prevent Illegal Music Downloads
Press Release
Newswise — A University of Tulsa computer science professor and a graduate student have been awarded a patent for a software-based method to prevent illegal downloading of music over the Internet.
U.S. Patent 6,732,180 was awarded May 4, 2004, to computer science professor John Hale and to Gavin W. Manes, a doctoral student in computer science.
The invention combats copyright infringement on peer-to-peer networks, or P2P, such as Gnutella, BitTorrent and Kazaa, by systematically injecting decoys into file-sharing networks -- essentially flooding the networks with alternative content that appears authentic.
Currently, songs protected by copyright are copied and uploaded on peer-to-peer networks, allowing anyone with Internet access to download those songs -- without paying the artist or record company for the benefit. The new technology would frustrate illegal downloads by overwhelming pirated music files with hundreds of decoys containing white noise, low quality recordings or advertisements urging users to legally buy the song.
The technology developed by Hale and Manes exploits the very characteristics that make such peer-to-peer environments breeding grounds for copyright infringement. Because anyone can connect to such a network and can do so anonymously, decoys are just as easily placed on the network and are that much harder to detect.
A report last year estimated that $700 million was lost in CD sales due to P2P piracy. Lawsuits filed by the Recording Industry Association of America have failed to stop such piracy, and Hale says the problem may worsen because the next generation of peer-to-peer systems offers superior connectivity, enhanced search facilities and even greater anonymity.
"The beauty of this approach is that it does not impede legitimate uses of P2P networks. It can surgically target pirated media," Hale says.
"Our invention is extremely resilient in terms of its ability to adapt to different networks, clients and protocols," explained Manes. "As long as a user can sign on to a network and trade files -- even anonymously -- our solution is effective."
The inventors and the university are commercializing the technology and exploring new options for licensing the patent.
Hale, who leads a group of researchers at The University of Tulsa in pursuing practical technologies for digital rights management, testified twice before Congress last year on the hazards of file-sharing networks, and sees the situation only growing worse.
"It really is just a massive problem, and one that calls for a combination of legislation, technology and awareness. But as far as technology goes, we believe we may have the most viable countermeasure that will stand the test of time."
http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/504833/
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U.S. Blunders With Keyword Blacklist
Declan McCullagh
The U.S. government concocted a brilliant plan a few years ago: Why not give Internet surfers in China and Iran the ability to bypass their nations' notoriously restrictive blocks on Web sites?
Soon afterward, the U.S. International Broadcasting Bureau (IBB) invented a way to let people in China and Iran easily route around censorship by using a U.S.-based service to view banned sites such as BBC News, MIT and Amnesty International.
But an independent report released Monday reveals that the U.S. government also censors what Chinese and Iranian citizens can see online. Technology used by the IBB, which puts out the Voice of America broadcasts, prevents them from visiting Web addresses that include a peculiar list of verboten keywords. The list includes "ass" (which inadvertently bans usembassy.state.gov), "breast" (breastcancer.com), "hot" (hotmail.com and hotels.com), "pic" (epic.noaa.gov) and "teen" (teens.drugabuse.gov).
"The minute you try to temper assistance with evading censorship with judgments about how that power should be used by citizens, you start down a path from which there's no clear endpoint," said Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard University law professor and co-author of the report prepared by the OpenNet Initiative. The report was financed in part by the MacArthur Foundation and George Soros' Open Society Institute.
That's the sad irony in the OpenNet Initiative's findings: A government agency charged with fighting Internet censorship is quietly censoring the Web itself.
The list unintentionally reveals its author's views of what's appropriate and inappropriate.
The IBB has justified a filtered Internet connection by arguing that it's inappropriate for U.S. funds to help residents of China and Iran--both of which receive dismal ratings from human rights group Freedom House--view pornography.
In the abstract, the argument is a reasonable one. If the IBB's service had blocked only hard- core pornographic Web sites, few people would object.
Instead, the list unintentionally reveals its author's views of what's appropriate and inappropriate. The official naughty-keyword list displays a conservative bias that labels any Web address with "gay" in them as verboten--a decision that affects thousands of Web sites that deal with gay and lesbian issues, as well as DioceseOfGaylord.org, a Roman Catholic site.
More to the point, the U.S. government could have set a positive example to the world regarding acceptance of gays and lesbians--especially in Iran, which punishes homosexuality with death.
In order to reach the IBB censorship-evading service, people in China or Iran connect to contractor Anonymizer's Web site. Then they can use Anonymizer.com as a kind of jumping-off point, also called a proxy server, to visit Web sites banned by their governments.
Ken Berman, who oversees the China and Iran Internet projects at IBB, said Anonymizer came up with the list of dirty words. "We did not," Berman said. "Basically, we said, 'Implement a porn filter.' We were looking for serious, hard-core nasty stuff to block...I couldn't come up with a list (of off-limits words) if my life depended on it."
In an e-mail to the OpenNet Initiative on Monday morning, Berman defended the concept of filtering as a way to preserve bandwidth. "Since the U.S. taxpayers are financing this program...there are legitimate limits that may be imposed," his message said. "These limits are hardly restrictive in finding any and all human rights, pro-democracy, dissident and other sites, as well as intellectual, religious, governmental and commercial sites. The porn filtering is a trade-off we feel is a proper balance and that, as noted in your Web release, frees up bandwidth for other uses and users."
OpenNet Initiative did its research by connecting to the Anonymizer service from computers in Iran and evaluating which Google Web searches were blocked that theoretically should not be.
The report concludes: "For example, usembassy.state.gov is unavailable due to the presence of the letters 'ass' within the server's host name, and sussex.police.uk is unavailable for the same reason. In addition, the words 'my' and 'tv,' which are also domain suffixes, are filtered by IBB Anonymizer. As a consequence, all Web hosts registered within the domain name systems of Malaysia and Tuvalu are unavailable."
"For example, usembassy.state.gov is unavailable due to the presence of the letters 'ass' within the server's host name."
--OpenNet Initiative's report
Harvard University's Berkman Center worked on the project, as did the University of Toronto's Nart Villeneuve and Michelle Levesque. They tested only connections from Iran, but Anonymizer said the same list of keywords was used for China.
The U.S. government "asked us to filter broadly based on keywords to generally restrict" Web sites, says Lance Cottrell, founder and president of San Diego-based Anonymizer. "What they didn't want to get into was something complex, fine-grained filtering which is going to try to remove all the porn. What they wanted was something that would generally remove most of the adult content while not blocking most of the information that these people need."
Cottrell said Anonymizer would manually unblock non-pornographic Web sites if requested by Chinese or Iranian Net surfers. "Literally, we have never been contacted with a complaint about overbroad blocking," he said.
Monday's report also takes a swipe at IBB and Anonymizer for not using the SSL encryption method to scramble the Web browsing behavior of Iranian citizens. "I would think that if the U.S. government is going to go through the trouble of funding and offering the service, they might offer the more secure one," Harvard's Zittrain said.
Anonymizer's Cottrell said he discontinued that feature because "it seemed to cause trouble for a lot of people. The utilization of the service went way down." Iran currently doesn't monitor the contents of Web pages downloaded. But if that changed, encryption would be turned back on, Cottrell said. (Because China does do that kind of monitoring, SSL is already enabled for Chinese users.)
This episode represents a temporary black eye for IBB, but it should also serve as a permanent lesson to the agency. When American taxpayers are paying the bill, any "anticensorship" scheme needs to be beyond reproach.
http://news.com.com/2010-1028-5204405.html
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Voice Preferred Medium For Wiretapping
Declan McCullagh
Only 4 percent of wiretaps not related to terrorism were targeted at computers and electronic devices last year, according to a government report made public last week. The rest of the 1,442 non-terrorism wiretaps--which intercepted a total of 4.3 million communications or conversations in 2003--were primarily aimed at voice communications, according to statistics from the U.S. courts. "The most active federal wiretap occurred in the district of Minnesota, where a racketeering investigation involving the interception of computer messages on a digital subscriber line resulted in the interception of a total of 141,420 messages over 21 days," the report said.P>
A second government document released April 30 summarizes wiretaps, typically related to terrorism and espionage, performed under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in 2003. The two-page letter offers few details, saying only that all but four of 1,727 requests for FISA wiretaps were approved last year.
http://news.com.com/2110-7348-5204674.html
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BearShare File-Sharing Service and the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy Partner Online to Reach Teens Nationwide
Press Release
Free Peers Inc., publishers of the BearShare file-sharing client, is partnering with the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy to focus the attention of teens on the importance of avoiding too-early pregnancy and parenthood. Millions of BearShare users will have the opportunity to download ten videos, created by film students conducted by the National Campaign and MediaLiquid, LLC. Designed to educate teens about teen pregnancy and how to reduce the chances of becoming pregnant, the partnership coincides with the May 5th National Day to Prevent Teen Pregnancy.
In conjunction with this news, BearShare is launching a new ''Peer Service Announcement'' program for cause marketers and political organizations of all shapes, sizes, and opinions, offering them free ''peer time'' on the BearShare networks similar to traditional PSA programs in the television radio and print media. Like a PSA in radio and television, BearShare will enable these organizations to share their messages with the BearShare audience in audio, video or flash formats. Users will be able to download the messages only from within the BearShare client.
''We are excited and proud to share with our users messages from all cause organizations at no cost. We recognize how important it is for these organizations to reach their audience, but they do not always have the necessary funding. This new network provides an essential service as costs of television, radio, and print advertising continue to rise,'' cites Louis Tatta BearShare COO.
''We are excited about working with BearShare to reach our audience. The new peer-to-peer networks are an important and unique way to reach our teen audience where they spend much of their time online,'' says Kate Ghiloni, spokesperson for the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy.
http://www.cpwire.com/archive/2004/5/5/1564.asp
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Ever heard of Winamp!?
Music Magic Found in the Shuffle
Leander Kahney
Napster revolutionized music distribution, but massive libraries of digital music and capacious players like the iPod are upending listening habits through something very simple but profound: random shuffle.
When music lovers first discover the iPod, or software like Winamp or iTunes, they often rhapsodize about the joys of randomly shuffling tracks.
"I have seen the future, and it is called Shuffle," writes Alex Ross, the New Yorker's music critic, who seems to have recently acquired an iPod.
Stuffy old listening habits -- like listening to albums from beginning to end -- are being thrown out in favor of allowing machines to choose songs at random, which often leads to unexpected, and magical, juxtapositions of music.
"There is something thrilling about setting the player on Shuffle and letting it decide what to play next," Ross writes. "The little machine often goes crashing through barriers of style in ways that change how I listen."
Random shuffle is nothing new. It first became popular as a feature of CD players. But with CDs, shuffling tracks is typically limited to the tracks on a single CD.
Randomly selecting tracks really comes into its own with giant music collections: libraries that stretch to tens of thousand of songs. In a giant library, random shuffle is a good way -- sometimes the only way -- to hear music that would otherwise go unplayed.
During a discussion of managing ever-growing music collections, one contributor noted his library stretches to 120 GB. Another counted the number of songs in his library he'd never heard: 20,000.
Lecturer Michael Bull, anointed the "world's leading expert on the social impact of personal stereo devices" by The New York Times, said random shuffle can turn large music libraries into an "Aladdin's cave" of aural surprises.
Bull, a lecturer in media and culture at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, is currently interviewing iPod users for a new study.
He reports one of his interviewees as saying, "I tend to listen to the iPod on random a great deal of the time.... With a large music collection, it is very easy to forget some of the gems that are in there, and random tends to bring some of those out again."
Bull said, "Their music collection becomes a treasure trove full of hidden delights which the magic of the machine throws up at them. Some users feel that the machine intuitively understands them by giving them just the type of music they want to listen to when they want it."
As columnist Steve Bowbrick notes in The Guardian, "This is a radically different way of encountering music and one I don't need to tell you is not possible in any other format."
Bull concurred. Bull said random shuffle has become one of the key components of new listening habits ushered in by digital music.
"Most users say they use (random shuffle) sometimes," Bull said. "Some -- about 25 percent -- use it most of the time. It's an important component of listening."
Increasingly, bloggers are celebrating the joys of random shuffle by posting lists of Random 25 tracks thrown up by their digital jukeboxes, as a search of Google attests.
James Kellaris, a professor of marketing at the University of Cincinnati and author of a study about tunes that stick in your head, said the appeal of random shuffle is likely generational.
Kellaris said random shuffle likely appeals to the MTV generation -- kids with short attention spans who are likely "brain damaged."
"Personally, and I believe I speak for many old farts here, I appreciate listening to music, be it an opera or a pop album, in the sequence in which the artist decided to present it," he said.
"Temporal order is an important element of how a work unfolds dynamically over time, an important factor underlying the aesthetic effect. Random shuffle pretty much flushes that down the toilet."
Bull noted that most listeners use random shuffle in particular settings, or in certain moods. Sometimes, he said, people can’t decide what to listen to: a problem easily solved by random shuffle.
While people often create playlists for specific activities (walking, driving, commuting, workouts, etc.), they also enjoy giving control to the machine, which can surprise and delight with unexpected selections of tracks, Bull said. The player will sometimes throw up combinations the user would never have dreamed of.
One user interviewed by Bull, for example, said the iPod "colors" one's surroundings, and random shuffle can significantly change one's perceptions of a familiar place.
"As it's on shuffle I don't know what's coming up next, and it often surprises me how the same street can look lively and busy and colorful one moment and then when a different song starts, it can change to a mysterious and unnerving place," Bull reports the interviewee as saying. "I like the sensation though."
Bull said the random selection of tracks allows the user to create unique personal narratives, like a private movie soundtrack, or to use the shuffle feature to bring up surprising memories.
"There's elements of the Dice Man here, coupled with the power to listen to things in a unique way -- a sequence that will probably never be repeated -- that makes their music collection even more exiting and mysterious," he said.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,...tml?tw=rss.TOP
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The Internet's Wilder Side
Seth Schiesel
T was just another Wednesday on the sprawling Internet chat-room network known as I.R.C. In a room called Prime-Tyme-Movies, users offered free pirated downloads of "The Passion of the Christ'' and "Kill Bill Vol. 2.'' In the DDO-Matrix channel, illegal copies of Microsoft's Windows software and "Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time,'' an Xbox game, were ripe for downloading. In other chat rooms yesterday, whole albums of free MP3's were hawked with blaring capital letters. And in a far less obtrusive channel, a hacker may well have been checking his progress of hacking into the computers of unsuspecting Internet users.
Even as much of the Internet has come to resemble a pleasant, well-policed suburb, a little-known neighborhood known as Internet Relay Chat remains the Wild West. While copyright holders and law enforcement agencies take aim at their adversaries on Web sites and peer-to-peer file-sharing networks like Napster, I.R.C. remains the place where people with something to hide go to do business.
Probably no more than 500,000 people are using I.R.C. worldwide at any time, and many of them are engaged in legitimate activities, network administrators say. Yet that pirated copy of Microsoft Office or Norton Utilities that turns up on a home-burned CD-ROM may well have originated on I.R.C. And the Internet viruses and "denial of service'' attacks that periodically make news generally get their start there, too. This week, the network's chat rooms were abuzz with what seemed like informed chatter about the Sasser worm, which infected hundreds of thousands of computers over the weekend.
"I.R.C. is where you are going to find your 'elite' level pirates,'' said John R. Wolfe, director for enforcement at the Business Software Alliance, a trade group that fights software piracy. "If they were only associating with each other and inbreeding, maybe we could coexist alongside them. But it doesn't work that way. What they're doing on I.R.C. has a way of permeating into mainstream piracy.''
Two weeks ago, the F.B.I., in conjunction with law enforcement agencies in 10 foreign countries, announced an operation called Fastlink, aimed at shutting down the activities of almost 100 people suspected of helping operate illegal software vaults on the Internet. The pirated copies of music, films, games and other software were generally distributed using a separate Internet file-transfer system, said a Justice Department spokesman, but the actual pirates generally used I.R.C. to communicate and coordinate with one another.
"The groups targeted as part of Fastlink are alleged to have used I.R.C. to have committed their crimes, like almost all other warez groups,'' the spokesman, Michael Kulstad, said in a telephone interview. Warez, pronounced like wares, is techie slang for illegally copied software.
When I.R.C. started in the 1980's, it was best known as a way for serious computer professionals worldwide to communicate in real time. It is still possible - though sometimes a bit difficult - to find mature technical discussions among the tens of thousands of I.R.C. chat rooms, known as channels, operating at any one time. There are also respectable I.R.C. systems and channels - some operated by universities or Internet service providers - for gamers seeking opponents or those who want to talk about sports or hobbies.
Still, I.R.C. perhaps most closely resembles the cantina scene in "Star Wars'': a louche hangout of digital smugglers, pirates, curiosity seekers and the people who love them (or hunt them). There seem to be I.R.C. channels dedicated to every sexual fetish, and I.R.C. users speculate that terrorists also use the networks to communicate in relative obscurity. Yet I.R.C. has its advocates, who point to its legitimate uses.
"I.R.C. is where all of the kids come on and go nuts,'' William A. Bierman, a college student in Hawaii who helps develop I.R.C. server software and who is known online as billy-jon, said in a telephone interview. "All of the attention I.R.C. has gotten over the years has been because it's a haven for criminals, which is a very one-sided view.
"The whole idea behind I.R.C. is freedom of speech. There is really no structure on the Internet for policing I.R.C., and there are intentionally no rules. Obviously you're not allowed to hack the Pentagon, but there are no rules like 'You can't say this' or 'You can't do that.' "
It is almost impossible to determine exactly how many people use I.R.C. and what they use it for, because it takes only some basic technical know-how to run an I.R.C. server. Because it is generally a text-only medium, it does not require high-capacity Internet connections, making it relatively easy to run a private I.R.C. server from home.
Some Internet experts believe that child pornography rings sometimes use their own private, password-protected I.R.C. servers. Particularly wary users can try to hide their identity by logging in to I.R.C. servers only through intermediary computers. There are, however, scores of public I.R.C. networks, like DALnet, EFNet and Undernet. Each typically ties together dozens of individual chat servers that may handle thousands of individual users each.
"We're seeing progressively more and more people coming onto the network every year,'' said Rob Mosher, known online as nyt (for knight), who runs a server in the EFNet network. "As more and more people get broadband, they are moving away from AOL and they still want to have chat.''
For end users, using I.R.C. is relatively simple. First, the user downloads an I.R.C. client program (in the same way that Internet Explorer is a Web client program and Eudora is an e-mail client program). There are a number of I.R.C. clients available, but perhaps the most popular is a Windows shareware program known as mIRC (
www.mirc.com).
When users run the I.R.C. program, they can choose among dozens of public networks. Within a given network, it does not really matter which individual server one uses. Alternately, if users know the Internet address of a private server, they can type in that address. Once logged in to a public server, the user can generate a list of thousands of available channels. On an unmoderated network, the most popular channels are often dedicated to trading music, films and software.
That is because in addition to supporting text-only chat rooms, I.R.C. allows a user to send a file directly to another user without clogging the main server.
That capability has a lot of legitimate uses for transferring big files that would be rejected by an e-mail system. Want to send your brother across the country a digital copy of your home movie without burning a disc and putting it in the mailbox? The file-transfer capability in I.R.C. may be the most convenient way.
Naturally, that file-transfer capability also has a lot of less legitimate uses. Advanced I.R.C. pirates automate the distribution of illegally copied material so that when a user sends a private message, the requested file is sent automatically. It is fairly common on I.R.C. for such a system to send out hundreds or even thousands of copies of the same file (like a music album or a pirated copy of Windows) over a few weeks.
An official from the Recording Industry Association of America said that some hackers even obtain albums that have been recorded but not yet released. "Quite often, once they get their hands on a prerelease, they will use I.R.C. as the first distribution before it goes out into the wider Internet,'' Brad A. Buckles, the association's executive vice president for antipiracy efforts, said in a telephone interview.
But perhaps the most disruptive use of I.R.C. is as a haven and communications medium for those who release viruses or try to disable Web sites and other Internet servers.
In some ways, the biggest problem is Microsoft Windows itself. Windows has holes that can allow a hacker to install almost anything on a computer that lacks a protective program or device called a firewall. Users' vulnerability can be compounded if they have not installed the latest patches from Microsoft.
Hackers scan through millions of possible Internet addresses looking for those unprotected computers and then use them to initiate coordinated "denial of service'' attacks, which flood the target machine (say, a Web site) with thousands or millions of spurious requests. In all of the noise, legitimate users find the target site unavailable.
How can a hacker direct his army of compromised drones to the target of the day? Through I.R.C.
"Each time it breaks into a new computer and turns it into a drone, the program copies itself and proceeds to keep scanning, and so very quickly you can have a very large number of drones,'' Mr. Bierman said, adding that a worm may well include a small custom-made I.R.C. client. "Then all of the drones connect to I.R.C. and go into one channel made especially for them. Then the runner can give commands to all of those drones.''
Chris Behrens, an I.R.C. software developer in Arizona known online as Comstud, said: "It's amazing how many machines at home are hacked or have been exploited in some way. We have seen 10,000 hacked machines connect to I.R.C. at one time, and they all go park themselves in a channel somewhere so someone can come along and tell them who to attack.''
Mr. Bierman and other I.R.C. developers and administrators said that they were contacted by federal law enforcement officials fairly often. Mr. Bierman said that he sometimes cooperated in helping the government track down specific people using I.R.C. to wage major attacks. He added, however, that he had refused government officials' requests to build a back door into his I.R.C. software that would allow agents to monitor I.R.C. more easily.
"Basically the F.B.I. is interested in the best way to monitor the traffic,'' Mr. Bierman said.
Mr. Kulstad of the Justice Department declined to comment on its specific contacts with the I.R.C. community.
Mr. Bierman and other I.R.C. administrators said that in addition to their free-speech concerns, they were also reluctant to confront hackers, because angry hackers often turn their drones against I.R.C. servers themselves.
Mr. Mosher echoed other I.R.C. administrators in saying that attempts to regulate the shady dealings online were doomed to failure.
"Look, if we find one channel and close it, they move to another,'' he said. "It's been like this for years. You can't really stop it.''
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/06/te...ts/06chat.html
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Gee, wonder who paid for this poll or “stop me before I download again.”
Survey Says! 63 Per Cent Of Canadians Think Downloading Violates Copyright
ChartAttack.com Staff
Are Canadians with Metallica on the downloading issue?
There was a time when Napster was everyone’s best friend, music was free and kids were sticking it the record companies with every download. It seemed fairly easy for downloaders to rationalize their burgeoning collection of music files — after all, the Britney’s and J-Lo’s were doing just fine already and those indie bands that no one had ever heard of were now getting an audience of listeners across the country.
Since the debut of peer-to-peer (P2P) downloading, there have been three sides to the debate. The noble few rejected downloading music files altogether, putting down their money to support the bands they like — anything less being technological robbery. Then there were those that simply gave up on the music industry, downloading entire albums — or that one hit single — and not thinking twice about it. Finally, there was the middle ground that would download songs to sample an artist with every intention to purchase the album if they liked what they heard.
In the wake of the American RIAA witch-hunt that targeted students and youngsters, the debut of new pay-per-download file sharing platforms like iTunes and Puretracks and the latest Federal Court decision on uploading music, the download debate rages on. However, now it seems that the noble few are growing. While Justice Konrad von Finckenstein’s ruled that making files available in online in shared directories was within the bounds of Canadian copyright law, Canadians have begun speaking out in support of copyright protection for musicians.
"No evidence was presented that the alleged infringers either distributed or authorized the reproduction of sound recordings," wrote von Finckenstein of the 29 people being investigated in the Federal Court ruling in his decision. "They merely placed personal copies into their shared directories which were accessible by other computer users via a P2P service."
A recent survey conducted by marketing research company POLLARA Inc. shows that the majority of Canadians disagree. Sixty-three per cent of Canadians disagreed directly with von Finckenstein’s ruling, saying that any Internet user making their music library available to others through peer-to-peer programs is a violation of the copyright of the artists.
The Canadian Copyright Act was amended in 1998 to allow for private copying of sound recordings for the use of the individual who made the recording. The amendment also imposed a levy on blank audio recording media to compensate the makers and recording artists. Even of those polled who were aware of the levy, 55 per cent did not believe that it granted individuals the right to upload music for others to download.
"The recent widespread publicity on the Federal Court ruling seems to have heightened the awareness of the Canadian public to copyright issues," Brian Robertson, President of the Canadian Recording Industry Association, said in a press release. "The results of this national survey are encouraging in terms of the high percentage of support for protecting music rights."
The great download debate continues, but with the Federal Court ruling opening some Canadians eyes to the copyright issues of music downloading, the sides are becoming more balanced. When Napster returns with its new Puretracks-type platform, some Canadians may be signing off of Kazaa for good.
http://www.chartattack.com/damn/2004/05/0305.cfm
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Hollywood Star's Wartime Secret Becomes a Screenplay
Kenneth Chang
Hedy Lamarr, the movie star who
is less well known as an inventor.
Vittorio Luzzati/National Portrait
Gallery, London
In 1933, at age 19, she swam in the nude in the notorious Czech film "Ecstasy." Often called the most beautiful woman in the world, she married badly — to a domineering Austrian munitions manufacturer — and escaped by drugging the maid and climbing out a window. She made her way to Hollywood, where she starred in movies with Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable and Jimmy Stewart.
Then there is the less known chapter of her life. In World War II, she offered her services as an inventor of weapons, coming up with a brainstorm that helped lead to wireless Internet and cellphones.
The Hedy Lamarr story: does it sound like the plot of a movie?
The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation thinks so. The foundation, which typically supports science and technology projects like a census of marine life and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to map millions of galaxies, is now making grants for screenplays with science or technology themes. This year, it awarded $48,000 to Gretchen Somerfeld, a Los Angeles writer, to refine her screenplay about Lamarr.
At the TriBeCa Film Festival on Sunday, actors read from Ms. Somerfeld's screenplay "Face Value." Sloan also makes grants at the Sundance and Hamptons film festivals.
"The bottom line in all of this is simply we think there are great opportunities here, great characters, great stories that have been largely unexplored," said Doron Weber, director of the Sloan program for public understanding of science and technology. "And when I speak of opportunities, I don't mean in an educational sense. We're speaking of what we believe are box office opportunities."
On Saturday at the festival, David Baxter, the other winner of a TriBeCa Sloan grant this year, will present background on his screenplay "The Broken Code." It tells of Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray images of DNA provided the inspiration for James Watson and Francis Crick to deduce its double-helix structure.
Franklin, who died in 1958, never knew that Dr. Watson and Dr. Crick had seen her images, and Mr. Baxter's screenplay traces the efforts of a friend and writer, Anne Sayre, who documented her contributions two decades later.
The Sloan Foundation also aids popular science books and Broadway plays. The goal, Mr. Weber said, is "to create more realistic and compelling and entertaining stories about science and technology and challenge existing stereotypes of scientists and engineers in the popular imagination."
Mr. Weber concedes that Hollywood, with its track record of mad-scientist stereotypes and plots that hinge on fallacious science, is a harder nut to crack. Movies are more expensive, take longer to produce and have to appeal to larger audiences who mostly do not care about any underlying physics or biology.
Filmmakers are not antiscience, he said; often, they just do not know any scientists. His program has also offered grants at film schools and has scientists speak to film students.
"The idea is to get more work into the pipeline," he said.
"Broken Code" is one of four projects related to the discovery of the double helix now circulating in Hollywood, and Ismail Merchant of Merchant Ivory Productions has signed on as executive producer.
Ms. Somerfeld confesses that science was her worst subject in school. What attracted her to Lamarr's story was not the technology, but her struggle to be seen as more than a beautiful woman. ("Any girl can be glamorous," Lamarr once said. "All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.")
Ms. Somerfeld called Lamarr "a woman who was out of sync with her time."
"Had she been born in another era," the writer said, "she could have really gone for it and lived up to her potential."
In her marriage to Fritz Mandl, the munitions maker, Lamarr sat in on his business meetings and learned that one of the elusive goals was to control weapons remotely by radio signals, what today would be called smart bombs. But radio signals can be readily jammed.
Lamarr's insight was to realize that continuously and randomly changing the radio frequencies would defy jamming. In early 1940, she and the composer George Antheil devised a system for airplanes to direct torpedoes toward their targets. Inspired by player pianos, Antheil conceived of a pair of paper rolls, one in the airplane, one in the torpedo, to specify the sequence of changing frequencies. "It's the damnedest Rube Goldberg you ever saw," said David Hughes, a retired colonel and a communications expert who will be the scientific consultant to Ms. Somerfeld. "But the seminal idea was there."
Antheil and Lamarr patented their scheme, which they called "frequency hopping," and donated it to the government. The Navy, doubting that the paper-roll devices could be built, declined to try to pursue it but nonetheless classified the idea.
An article in The New York Times on Oct. 1, 1941, briefly noted Lamarr's invention, saying, "So vital is her discovery to national defense that government officials will not allow publication of its details."
In the late 50's, the frequency-hopping idea began to be used in military computer chips. Lamarr received no recognition, because the patent remained classified until 1985. Since then, the idea has been applied to cellphones, cordless phones and Wi-Fi Internet protocols that allow many people to share the same range of radio frequencies. (If the frequencies continuously change, the chances of one signal's interfering with another drop.)
Lamarr, who lived a reclusive life in her later years, won the Pioneer Award of the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 1997. The award recognizes major achievements in computer communications. She died in 2000.
With the vagaries of filmmaking, "Face Value" is still far from production, but it has a chance, Mr. Weber said.
"The film has buzz," he said. "It's now in the pile of things they're going to look at."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/04/science/04FILM.html
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For the Viewer, No Escape Hatch in a Digital 3-D Film
Eric A. Taub
UNLESS you are burdened with a bad case of tunnel vision, life unfolds not just in front of you, but above and to the sides as well. That is one reason 3-D movies never quite look real: while that bullet might appear to be heading straight for you, it is easy to look away from the screen and be reassured that the end of your time on earth has not yet come.
Viewers of a new short "Star Trek'' film that opened in the Las Vegas Hilton last month might find that sort of critical distance a bit more difficult to summon. A digital effects company in Santa Monica, Calif., has created a 3-D movie that not only gives the illusion of a world in front of you, but all around.
The visual technique created by the company, Threshold Digital Research Labs, surrounds the viewer with images in the same way that Dolby Digital 5.1-channel audio gives listeners a sense that they are enveloped by voices and effects: it's surround sound for the eyes.
The technique is being used in a seven-and-a-half-minute film that is part of "Star Trek: Borg Invasion 4D,'' a 22-minute attraction at the hotel.
"It gets harder and harder to come up with something to encourage people to leave the house," said Larry Kasanoff, the chairman of Threshold. "We needed to create a film that would last for years and that people would fly in to see."
The film's conceit is that the humanlike Borgs are trying to capture the space station that the attraction's audience is ostensibly visiting. As the station's crew fights back, viewers find themselves in the middle of the action. The floor of the theater moves, seat cushions inflate and deflate to simulate acceleration and impact, and at one point a mist of water is sprayed in viewers' faces.
The film combines 10 actors with 130 computer-generated figures. To shoot the live action, Threshold used two high-definition video cameras mounted next to each other. To change the sense of depth, the cameras' distances were varied.
The filmmakers could tell immediately if they got the shot they wanted because they were watching the 3-D scenes unfold on a 26-foot diagonal video screen in a tent next to the shoot. "While you look foolish wearing polarizing 3-D glasses, it's a great way to direct a movie," said George Johnsen, the company's chief animation and technology officer.
To reduce eyestrain, the company shot each scene so that both the foreground and the background were in focus. The filmmakers could then create parallel planes of action, allowing viewers to scan the frame to discover unconnected activities going on throughout the ship.
Because everything is always in focus, the production company had to imbue each element with rich detail, whether it was part of a ship or one of the many computer- generated characters talking to colleagues on catwalks or riding elevators seemingly hundreds of yards away.
Threshold masked the discontinuity between the vertical and ceiling action by using part of the ship to hide the seam between the two screens.
To create the overhead action, Mr. Johnsen and his colleagues wrote an algorithm that would put the computer-generated animation in proper perspective. While the ceiling screen is at a 90-degree angle to the vertical wall, a spaceship passing overhead would need to appear to spread out as it passed above and then receded in the distance.
This visually rich environment required a lot of computer processing power to render. Motion picture companies faced with similar challenges often purchase hundreds of high-speed servers to create animated frames.
To avoid getting stuck with a big hardware investment that could be obsolete in a matter of months, Threshold contracted out their rendering needs, leasing time from I.B.M.'s Deep Computing Capacity on Demand center in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and sending files to it through high-speed T-1 lines.
"There was no point spending three to five million dollars on computers that could be obsolete in a few months," Mr. Johnsen said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/06/te...ts/06vega.html
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In Europe, Cellphone Profits Go Up as Clothes Come Off
Jennifer L. Schenker
EXECUTIVES of some of the world's largest telecommunications companies came to Amsterdam late last month and hobnobbed with sex shop owners, publishers of pornographic images and producers of hard-core videos.
The thrill they were seeking, of course, was economic.
Until recently, risqué mobile phone services have been limited. But now that third-generation, high-speed networks and cellphones that offer video are on the European market, carriers are looking to make money by a proven method: pornography.
Gartner, the industry research company, estimates that sexual content over cellphones will generate $1.5 billion in Western Europe next year, or about 5.1 percent of the total mobile data market.
The Vodafone Group, based in Britain and one of the world's largest mobile operators, has introduced what it calls "risqué" content through its Vodafone Live portal in 10 of the 16 markets where the portal is available, and other mainstream cellphone operators and content providers are gearing up. For Vodafone, content ranges from off- color jokes to photos of topless women, but more hard-core material is expected to follow.
"It is a big commercial opportunity, so it is fair to say that commercial operators will have to exploit this opportunity in some way," said Tina Southall, head of content standards for the company.
Sexual content represents "one of the few possibilities for mobile operators to make significant revenues, even if they don't want to admit it," said Berth Milton, chief executive of the Private Media Group, a Nasdaq-listed company based in Barcelona, Spain, that distributes pornography. "Operators have put billions of euros into 3G networks, so they need to generate revenues even more than the content providers."
Of course, there is the question of whether phones are a good medium for pornography.
Mr. Milton of Private Media Group said that videos would have be adjusted. "We will have to edit them and make them more interactive," he said.
So far, the public seems to like what it sees. Netcollex, a British company that offers both soft and hard pornography over cellphones, said that in 12 months it had signed up 67,000 customers, who pay $2.65 to see one of a selection of short video clips, plus transmission charges.
But while the financial rewards are clear, so are the complications. The question of how to get involved while remaining good corporate citizens was part of what brought executives from big carriers like Vodafone, Orange, MM02 and Virgin Mobile, among others, to a panel discussion that drew participants from overlapping trade shows on telecommunications and adult entertainment in Amsterdam last month.
Virgin Mobile, which has 5.5 million customers in Britain, the United States and Australia, has created a position called "head of adult services," said John Conlon, who holds the title. But he said that the company did not plan to introduce these services until safeguards were in place.
Vodafone will work with banks to see if a person's address matches the credit card used, on the assumption that those under 18 do not have credit cards. It is also working to introduce filters that would permit parents to block their children's phones from receiving sexual content, Ms. Southall said.
Richard Brown, group public affairs director for MM02, the British mobile phone company, said that while the Internet "proved almost impossible to control," the industry hopes that installing safeguards early will provide some protection.
Still, he said, "It is harder to supervise such a personal device than it is to control what little Johnny is doing on a computer."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/04/te...al/04SHEN.html
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Italian satellite service throttles down P2P
Allot Boosts Satellite Bandwidth
Press Release
Allot Communications, the traffic management company, today announced that Netsystem, Italy’s leading Internet via satellite provider, has selected Allot’s NetEnforcer platform to manage the protocol traffic of its 65,000 subscriber community. Allot’s award-winning NetEnforcer product line is a traffic management and service control device that provides sophisticated monitoring, traffic shaping and reporting capabilities up to Layer 7.
Netsystem, with its strategic partner, SES ASTRA, Europe's leading direct-to- home satellite service provider, serves subscribers not reached by a terrestrial connection with a broadband service fully comparable, in terms of price and performance, to the regular ADSL offering.
Combining two NetEnforcer devices from Allot Communications with Netsystem’s Bandwidth Control Manager has enabled Netsystem to optimise its platform, thereby successfully answering the business and technical challenges involved in pioneering a totally new technology – ADSL via satellite:
Offering guaranteed bandwidth per subscriber, as stated in the Service Level Agreement (SLA).
Guaranteeing user fairness, in a tiered service model.
Monitoring the impact of bandwidth-hungry Peer to Peer (P2P) protocols such as KaZaA and other multimedia file sharing applications.
“Providing Quality of Service comparable to terrestrial ADSL service enables us to meet our business goals and attract new subscribers to our fast Internet service. As a result of this capability, in May 2003 Telecom Italia chose Netsystem technology, including Allot’s NetEnforcer, to launch its ADSL via satellite service re-named with its ADSL brand ALICE-SAT”, said Stefano Frassa, NetSystem CTO. “NetEnforcer was selected because of its P2P monitoring capabilities and its seamless integration within our NBCM,” explains Frassà.
“Netsystem’s project shows again the importance of a service control solution to help network and internet service providers achieve their business goals” said Menashe Mukhtar, VP International Sales at Allot Communications. “This project was awarded to Allot because of the unique capabilities of our product and the innovative support of our engineers in establishing integration with Netsystem provisioning systems.”
http://www.lightreading.com/document...g&doc_id=52114
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Love On The Grid
Susan Kuchinskas
SocialGrid, a free service that launched Monday, is capitalizing on two of the industry's hottest trends: search engines and online social networking.
The idea is simple. Registered members turn their own personal or business Web pages into free personals ads.
Members that sign up with the Orange County, Calif.-based firm get a string of HTML to put on their personal or business Web pages. The SocialGrid Search System then translates information that members enter into their SocialGrid profiles. Then Google and other search engines index not only the page but also the profile.
"It's a Google for people," said SocialGrid founder Chau Vuong. While most social networking sites, such as Friendster and Tickle.com let members search for each other within the site itself, SocialGrid is an open social network that is not confined to any degree or any site, Vuong said.
There are two ways for members to find each other: via Google search or by using a peer-to-peer search application that works in conjunction with Google. Members don't have to learn the various tags, such as "ag33" for someone who's 33-years-old, or "r01" for Catholic. When they fill out the registration form and profile on the SocialGrid site, the form automatically generates the appropriate tags. The tags can be seen when the page's source code is viewed, but within the browser they look like small barcodes, which can be placed unobtrusively on the member's page.
Vuong said another important feature is that members can search ranges, for example, asking for men between 24- and 30-years-old. The P2P search tool expands Google's capabilities, letting members search for ranges of criteria and an increased number of criteria, for example, the elusive SF32, employed, likes tennis and walks on the beach.
Users perform a Google search by going to SocialGrid.com and using pull- down menus. The back-end technology transforms the menu items, and then queries Google's servers. The results are returned on Google's search site.
The P2P application, SocialGrid Search Engine, is a downloadable application that lets users search in a way similar to file- sharing applications; SocialGrid says it is spyware-free.
The service is based on tagging technology and doesn't require database access. Members can put their barcodes on their own sites, or build a simple personal page on SocialGrid.com.
http://www.internetnews.com/ec-news/article.php/3349261